[Milsurplus] Motorola Airboy

[Hubert Miller]

This is a semihacked Motorola Airboy, a small private aircraft radio from the late 1940s.
Transmit is 1 channel, 3023.5 kHz, about 2 watts input; receive is LF. Uses 1.5 volt tubes and is powered only by battery pack.
This example has been built into a homemade sheet metal cabinet with space for the A and B batteries. Unfortunately the rear shell of the radio's cabinet
was discarded. I am not that thrilled with the sheet metal work; it's thin alu and kind of flimsy and some of the edges are sharper than I like.
The second photo shows the radio chassis pulled from this cabinet.
I ask your opinion: leave it as is, or toss the homebuilt cabinet for use as "open" type radio. It will stand upright even without the rear part of the radio
original cabinet. Even tho I'm not that thrilled with the homebrew housing, it does represent some history. And without this housing, you have only the
radio without full cabinet, which puts it at risk for survival down the line.

Also, I wonder if anyone reading is real thrilled with the idea of this thing. I have not quite decided on deaccession yet.
Dave Stinson has pioneered using HF civil aircraft radios on 80M. He puts a 3885 or 80M rock in the slot and uses a small converter to convert
receiving down to the LF receive range. Possibly a clever worker could find off-the-shelf coils to modify the receive range to the low SW band.
-Hue

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